May contain nuts.

Written a game, or just planning to write the next HeliAttack ? Either way, no matter how great your love of game development is, it's still nice to have something to pay the bills with.

Our mate Adam ( Author of the sexy Asteroids Revenge III ) has put together a great resource for all things sponsorship. If you're an old hand, or brand new to the whole world of selling your Flash ass for cash, it's well worth a read.

You certainly know the excitement when a *very* expensive piece of software finally arrives? Not that I was already a bit bitter about the fact that I had to pay a *lot* more than an american customer (for the English version mind you).

So I opened the parcel, and what came ot was a ... 5cm x 15cm x 20cm, about DVD-Box sized, thin cardboard box with the CD's ...

I mean, not even a Quickstart guide ... I wasn't really expecting a printed handbook (which really would be a dream), but at least some sort of keyboard shortcuts ...

</rant off>

Though I must admit that the whole thing is impressive ... so I ordered a new comp, too.

Just finished the oh-so-boring part of the our new game: the editor, though, whilst enjoying the pure "place the tile" part, I really hate the "enter relevant data and save it" part.

Did I mention that I hate flash for it's form handling capabilities?You either be stuck with using the normal textfield/button combo (with as much comfort as a nailbed) or use the wonderfull working, easy to handle, well thought components (in case you didn't notice the sarcasm in the last part, well there's a LOT).

While waiting for the upgrade to cs3 (shipped box, which is *cheaper* than the d/load version) I'm stuck with f8 and as2. Whoever had the idea of the event handling system must be a complete genius, I mean he just must be, because I don't understand it. I mean I can use it and I get all events wired, but I don't understand the "why on earth does it have to be so ...".

Anyway, I think I just have to live with it and use my own ".net" style wrapper code.

Having the editor done (and beeing able to load/save levels) I now start to create the game engine (which should also run in the editor, because you should be able to test your levels).As the game will feature a few indepent moving "characters", I'll have to rewrite some parts of the time based tilemovement engine allowing to check for junctions, stops and of course other things moving around.

I'm not quite sure about this, but I guess I'm going to use the ASBroadcast approach I used for virus.

Back to the hell that is coding ...

nGFX.

ps: Just got my xbox 360 copy of Overlord (us, de) so I guess I'll give a short comment on that later this week.

Nah. painting is pure joy. Keeping an eye on your grandchild, too. Don't try it at the same time, though.

Finally after all those weeks here are some screenies from "Holding the Baby" or short ... HTB, one of the five games from the "Game of Life" collection we did (and one of the games I had the joy of doing).

I've noticed my little frame counter pop up in quite a few peoples games since I included it in a bit of open source, which I do find pretty cool ( I wonder if anyone's used my scroller class ? Doubt it ).

Anyway, I thought it may help someone out there if I posted my as3 version. It's written using Flex as opposed to Flash, so it uses [Embed] to bring the assets into the swf, but I wouldn't have thought getting it working in CS3 would be that much of a mare.

Hopefully it should all be pretty straight forward, it just requires two arguements to get it going. Anyway, enjoy seeing how quick your shiny new as3 code really is.

While waiting for feedback for "High Jinx" and "Hold the Baby" I decided to play with Legos ... or at least with virtual Lego bricks (saves the cleaning up afterwards *and* of course you have all the parts you need)

Virtual Lego?

Yep. Right now I know of two methods to do so:The Lego way using Lego's own virtual Lego builder. Great thing if you want to build your virtual model with real Lego bricks afterwards, because you can buy the parts you've used online. Only drawback atm is that not all parts are available, so you have to use the "default" ones ...

The "LDraw" way.
LDraw™ is an open standard for LEGO CAD programs that allow the user to create virtual LEGO models and scenes.Just head over to the download section and get started. I prefer MLCad, which is a great editor (it takes a few minutes to get used to it, but you get things done without looking at the manual)

So I grabbed some of my old model building instructions and just recreated one of my very first Lego model I bought from my own money (and man, did I mow a lot of grass for it):

while inbetween two bigger projects (that surely will leave no room for just "playing" around), I wanted to get my head into a new game. The idea was fresh, and highly motivated I started to code some samples in order to see if the flash player could handle it at all.

Nope, it couldn't.

The goal was to be able to move over a "3d" landscape, textured was my first plan, coloured is what I ended up with.

And no, it *wasn't* code excution speed. So two weeks were wasted trying different approaches to achieve the same result, but somehow failed. While the code took about 1 at a high rate 3 ms, flash's graphic renderer consumed between 30 and 90 ms.

As the stat's say the code is fast enough, I didn't see the point of moving to AS3, though it might make the whole thing possible - but for now I can happily ignore all the AS3 buzz and see that I get things done.

shish!

Anyway, I hope I be able to set up a little example swf, because the idea still isn't dead - it just needs some more thinking :)